On Friday, we brought you the story of Jon, a Nintendo fan who spent $400 downloading old games to his Wii, but, through a mistake of his own and due to Nintendo's unusually strict digital-downloads policy, found himself with access to none of those games.

Jon is an enthusiastic Nintendo fan. He buys all of Nintendo's systems. He buys many, many…
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The lesson: a Nintendo machine isn't like an iPhone; your content is locked to the username that is locked to your console (though it seems Nintendo customer service can get around this).

After that story ran, I heard from another Nintendo fan. This one is named Ryan, and he had a very different experience. He'd downloaded $570 worth of games to his Wii. He ran into trouble transferring them to his Wii U. Unlike Jon, he didn't run afoul of Nintendo's strict policies—he didn't trade a broken Wii U in for a new one and lose his licenses to his games in the process. Instead, he called Nintendo customer service when his Wii U wouldn't play nice with his Wii. He asked customer service to help him with the transfer.

Basically, Nintendo remotely deleted the licences for my Virtual Console and WiiWare purchases remotely from my Wii system, and credited my Wii shop on the Wii U with 57000 points ($570, the value of my Wii Virtual Console/Wiiware library). Then they gave me a bonus $50 to my Wii U account for "the inconvenience."

So we still have a Nintendo that can keep a record of the games you downloaded and registered but might not give you access to them again if you don't follow their recommended steps. But we also have a Nintendo that had mercy on Ryan and even threw in some extra for his troubles.